This is pretty cool - I get to
write a
paper on SOAP and its uses. Since a couple of things that I
use a lot
have recently come out with SOAP interfaces, I've got ready-made
examples. Other than that, I also acquired papers to do in
two more
classes: a 6-10 pager on SOAP, a 15 pager on some as yet
undetermined
topic in Senior Seminar, and a proof that will probably end
up being
between 8 and 10 pages in Combinatorics. Fun fun fun.

Hacking

Not a terribly large amount of
this going
on, beyond the fact that I get to show someone how to read data
records that span multiple lines in Perl. Other than that, I've
automated enough stuff that I'm comfortable with my system.
It's a
very odd feeling not wanting to make any massive
improvements on my
systems. More RAM would be nice, but that's minor.

Life

We broke all sorts of heat records
today,
and with the advent of summer comes one particularly
annoying plague
and one happy event. The happy event, of course, is ladies
finally
coming out from under the layers of sweaters and jackets.
The annoying
plague is the corresponding swarm of shirtless guys everywhere,
reminding me that I really did need to be working out over the
winter. So I walked down to the river and then did some work
on the
stair machine. Not much, but maybe it will have an effect
after a
month.

Other than that, not terribly much is going on.
I'm an
exceptionally boring person at times, and this is one of
them. I'm
still wondering if or how much I've fucked up with Emilia. The
opportunity to talk to her just hasn't presented itself, so
until it
does or I manufacture it, I guess I'll have to live in
mystery.

I'm really enjoying the
nightly walks
to the river, as they give me a chance to talk with friends,
find out what's going on in their lives, that kind of thing.
I was
informed that I was sending "mixed messages" this past
summer. It figures,
since my motivations were pretty mixed as well. I guess one
lives and
learns, neh?

This very moment, I am working on a paper
that I should have begun work upon 12 hours ago. However, random life
interfered, and I was unable to begin work until now.

Hacking

So, I decided today to add a hard drive
to my computer. This is not a task that is particularly difficult -- I
did them routinely when I worked for the Hardware department, and
never really had any issues with that. Well, I add the hard drive to
the computer, start up, autodetect the hard drive with the computer
and all is going well. However, all was not well as my Ethernet card
decided not to work for a while. Separating the hard drives and giving
the NIC a time out worked though, so now my computer is
happy. <grin>

Life

So yesterday(Saturday) was a very very bad
day. Today(Sunday) is going to be a very very good day to compensate
for that fact.

Emilia seems to be scared of
me now. I'm not entirely sure why, and I think that's what bothers me
the most. She just wouldn't look at me and wouldn't talk to me and
seemed so utterly serious. I feel really bad, since I just want to
make her happy and it's sorta obvious that I'm not doing that right
now. I'm not precisely sure what my course of action is going to be --
I suspect that I'm just going to go with the flow. I've got three
weeks to make up lost ground, so hopefully I can manage to do
that. She enjoyed spending time with me once, and hopefully she can
again.

On a lighter note, it's good to have conversations with
friends. I've had several in the past couple days, and it just makes
things a whole lot better. It's scary to think that May 19 is
approaching so darned fast.

I'm sure my response to
shlomif's article is probably unjustified. Maybe I'm
just lucky to be at an institution where I do learn things in my
classes. I just have a hard time understanding how someone could feel
that they would be learning more outside of an institution dedicated
to teaching you things than inside it. Maybe it's a personal hangup or
something: I have too much invested in the system to be able to
divorce myself from it.

Within the system, as it were, life goes on. I'm giving a
presentation on one of several proofs of Turan's theorem tomorrow, as
are the rest of the people in the class. After these are complete,
we're going to debate which is the most elegant
mathematically. The networks test seemed to go fine -- studying hard
for it really did pay off quite well. I felt comfortable, which can be
so critical.

Hacking

I'm trying to find time to implement a
friend's protocol for game communication. I've had about half an hour
to look at it, and it should be doable, if not the simplest thing in
the world. Personal note: docs found here.

Life

Life has been somewhat complex. Women are very
complex. I'm not sure how badly I screwed things up, if I screwed
things up, or if I'm doing OK. Who knows? I'll just keep doing my
best.

School goes on, if not completely
spectacularly. I think the biggest problem I have right now is the
fact that I'm so worried about my networks test tomorrow I've actually
made flashcards. I haven't done that in a long, long
time.

Other than that, I get to go fight with our student
government over how much money the ACM gets this year. It should be
very interesting, and I'm not sure that we're going to get enough
money. Ultimately, it might be worth it to simply stop being a student
organization within those confines and just go back to being a
departmental organization.

Hacking

Not a terribly exciting stretch of
time. My first cron job is still working, so I guess I didn't screw it
up. I get to hack on a bunch of output parsing later today, so that
should be a lot of fun. I did a presentation to my programming
languages class on GOO, which
went OK, but the problem came in that I wasn't really able to
experiment with the language at all before it, so some of the
behaviors I had to extrapolate from the documentation, not
code. *sigh* I guess he'll release it eventually.

Life

Aside from the fact that my social life has
been greatly curtailed by the amount of studying that I've been doing,
not much else has been going on. I demonstrated my impeccable sense of
timing last night when asking Emilia to coffee. I showed up 10 minutes
too late and she was already in editing mode on her honors
thesis. I can completely understand that, so I'm only a little sad
that we didn't get to go. Maybe next time.

A couple other tensions have been wandering around my group
of friends. I'm not quite sure what to do, since I agree with the
sentiments wholeheartedly, but at the same time recognize that those
same sentiments didn't really help all that much in the
past. Hopefully everything will get worked out in the end. Pah. Social
interaction is so messy sometimes. I guess I'll just go back to
practicing backrubs on people and not worrying about how it turns out.

Quite a bit of homework needs to be done,
and I've not much time to do it. In order of priority, I have half a
combinatorics homework assignment(well, a little more but I'll be
generous), a 3-5 page draft for Economics of Gender, and a
presentation for my programming languages senior seminar.

I've already figured out the topic for my presentation --
I'm going to talk about the new and interesting features found in GOO. Yeah, it sounds like a bad joke
to some extent, but it's actually quite interesting. The language is
the logical extension of Scheme into a purely object-oriented, typed
language. It should be interesting to see how the ideas for its design
fit together in my head with what I've learned thus far this
semester. Articulating those ideas should be even more
interesting

Hacking

Aside from setting up my first cron job
ever, dedicated to running rdate -s -p time-b.nist.gov, not much. It's
pretty cool to get an email once a night that says "Yup, everything is
ok." I guess I'll learn to like cron more in the future.

Work

Quickie Perl is fun -- I got to write a
script that moves inboxes to a new location on the system to alleviate
overcrowding in /var/mail, and tells users what it did. Hopefully
people will move their stuff elsewhere and won't get whacked by it,
but you never know.

Life

Wow, is life ever complicated. Yesterday it
seemed like everything I touched was turning into ash. Shot down for a
job, was a complete and utter bastard in front of the girl I like a
lot, got specifically targeted by a professor in class when I was
trying to lay low. Everything seemed to be crashing down on me. Then,
today was the day of Owen doing/saying stupid things. I managed to
work three into a conversation with Emilia in under a minute. I don't
think I've been on such a roll for a while, so it was nice, in a very
twisted sort of way.

The idiocy starts about 2:00 in the afternoon, when I stop
by her place, only to discover she's not home. Not daunted, I stop by
at 4:00, with approximately the same results. Then about 4:30 I leave
a voice mail message suggesting that she call me and we try to do
something. However, as fate would decree it I don't see her again till
dinner. College cafeterias are interesting places, and at a school as
small as Macalester you can't avoid running into people at times. So,
I see her at supper, but she's sitting with a guy that I really have
some serious issues with. He's not a bad person per se, we just have
personal difficulties. This makes it sorta hard for me to walk up and
ask if she wants to do something tonight. So, I don't, and instead
diddle around trying desperately to catch her when she's not around
him. This doesn't happen, sadly, and so I run home. There, the
mistakes begin(the real ones -- the ones made at supper were simple by
comparison).

To begin with, I pick up the phone and call without
checking for messages. I sorta have plans for the evening, but they
would very much be malleable depending on what she wants to do. In not
checking my voice mail messages, I miss the one she sent saying that
she hoped to see me at destination X this evening. So I call, and ask
her to destination Y, phrasing it such that it sounds like I'm
planning to do Y regardless of what she says(which wasn't true at the
time). This, by itself, isn't mistake number two. Mistake number two
is asking her which she thinks I should do. She suggests Y. Slightly
flustered, I only semi-jokingly ask if she "wants me to stop asking
her" This is mistake number three. Yeah, I'm dense. Luckily, she's an
absolute sweetie, and responds with something along the lines of "I
like spending time with you, but it looks like not tonight." I think I
managed to escape without making any more mistakes. Y was indeed fun,
but I'm sorta stuck wondering about how X went and whether she's still
busy writing her paper right now. Ah, well. I seem to have survived,
though I'm covered in egg. It should be interesting to see what kind
of hard time she gives me tomorrow.

One option down and out. They're not going
to extend me an offer at this time. Who knows how things are going to
work, but I guess I'm of two minds about it. Part of me thought the
job would have been really interesting, but the other part of me was
shuddering inside. I guess that since the decision got made for me, I
don't have to worry about it. Oh, well. Off to celebrate the
weekend.

Setting emacs to not use an init
file and instead load this new barebones .emacs with the -l
commandline option when invoked as EDITOR

Defining a function
which will insert the skeleton of my diary into the buffer when
called

I didn't particularly think I had it in me, but it ended up
working
great. Advodiary is quite cool, though I must admit it's a
pity the
emacs-mode I saw only works with emacs 20.7. 21 is just so
much nicer
on Windows. Yaay for sleep-deprived hacking.

Edit: Not only did I do that, but I was on
such a roll I decided to set up Ispell as well. So now I can
spell-check my entries before I submit them. Thanks to
cmiller for such a cool toy. Whee!

School is going fairly well, such as these
things go. It's crunch time, and I really should be working on
combinatorics right now, but I haven't made an entry in a while. My
last couple of exams have been a lot of fun, in that I kicked ass on
them. High score in the class, and the teacher liked my paper enough
that it was the one that got sent around(sans name of course). I guess
that's a sign of a good job.

Hacking

Aside from some more work with AspectJ,
not much has been going on. It's really rather sad -- I quite enjoy
programming, but other homework has been getting in the way. Lots of
papers to read in my senior seminar class.

Life

Life has been overall excellent, modulo some
minor annoyances. Most happily, I've been able to talk with Emilia --
things seem to be going well there. I dropped by intending to stay ~15
minutes and ended up talking for three hours, which was a lot of
fun. Put me a little behind the curve, but hey, that's
life.

I feel really silly sometimes -- I wish that I could
explain to girls in words why they're so incredibly
cool/sexy/beautiful/attractive/<adjective here>, but the words just
never seem to come out. Or when they do, it's at the wrong time or
phrased wrong and I end up coming off smarmy rather than just nice
like I was trying to. Oh, well.

School is slowing down, as the
nasty homework winnows out the chaff that is busywork. I'm
not entirely sure if this is a good thing. I did my
presentation on Aspect-Oriented languages today in Sem,
which was fun. I really need to learn to tone down the
hyperkinetic presentation style I seem to have developed
somewhere along the line. That and the fact that I draw a
diagram, get halfway done, see that my audience gets the
point, and stop, leaving an orphaned diagram or scrap of
code, is always fun. We apparently messed up part of our
proof for the combinatorics homework assignment, so that's
pesky. It'll need to be a fast fix, too. Econ of Gender is
fun, though I paid for making a sarcastic comment by being
asked a fairly difficult question. Oh, well -- sometimes
you're just grumpy. You pay your dues.

Hacking

Retrofitting a school project
with AspectJ is really interesting. I've been thinking about
how I want to do the design for a while, and it's getting to
the point where I think I've got what I want in my head. I
wonder if there's an Ant build task for
it?

In sadder news, my RSI has been
getting worse. I'm a college student -- I'm not supposed to
be getting RSI this early in life. I've got a better set up
wrist braces, and upgraded to an ergonomic keyboard on my
work machine, so hopefully that will stem the tide. I
suspect stress to some extent -- I wasn't bothered at all
last semester.